In the late 1980s, while still at the Technical University of Munich in Germany, Klaus Schulten found himself strapped for time on the handful Cray supercomputers that were available then. To complete a particularly challenging computation—one simulating the structure and dynamics of cell membranes—Schulten thought he could speed things up by running the experiment on a parallel computer, which would divide the problem into separate tasks and solve them simultaneously.

Since no such machines were available to him, Schulten and his students built their own with 30 off-the-shelf processors. Schulten and his team have always done what it takes to harness leading-edge computer technology, even when they have had to roll up their sleeves and build the resources themselves.

Now a professor of physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a faculty member at the Beckman Institute, Schulten studies a variety of cellular activities—from how muscle proteins hold together to how single-celled organisms convert light to energy. Alliance supercomputers currently help him perform this research, but his drive for further innovation continues to shine through.

"I want to understand complete cellular machines, going from the atomic and molecular level all the way to large complexes involving hundreds of thousands to a million atoms," Schulten says. "That's what drives me to embrace the best computational resources."

Access Online | Posted 3-28-2000